After looking through the resources available on-line I've come to the conclusion that some kind of failsafe gearing guide might be in order after all.

I'll assume that you either reconnected to WoW rather recently (and are trying to gear up) or have found yourself stuck on a few slots because you failed to bribe the gods of RNG well enough.

As usual I will only cover gear that is guaranteed to exist, or at least virtually garanteed.

1) The good news

You rushed through Pandaria as retribution and dinged 90. Now you're shaking the sweat off your hands and start looking around for beginners tanking gear so you can start tanking. Sixteen slots of questing gear to be replaced before you can tank away. Actually, no. Two slots of gear to be replaced. You need a one-hander and a shield. Oh, and you want to reforge some of the gear you already have.

2) The bad news

While levelling to 90 you picked up the odd piece here and there which virtally screamed TANKING GEAR at you. You smile at your good planning and pluck those items out from your bank. There's a minor problem. A good quarter of all tanking gear is designed to be dropped in the waste bin. You don't want it anywhere close to you if you plan to tank. Anything with both parry and dodge is likely to be an awful piece of junk. You need to make a sanity check to be sure the battered retribution gear you wear isn't better for tanking than the dedicated tanking gear you have in your wardrobe.

3) Stats

Short version: Hit/Expertise > Mastery/Haste > Parry/Dodge

Marginally longer version: Go easy on the H/E as long as you're only tanking five-mans. You only need to handle level 92, not boss-level (unless you're doing Challenge Modes in which case you'd better gear for level 93 opponents). You also probably want to unbalance M/H. Read the threads elsewhere on Maintankadin where the Mastery-tanks and the Haste-tanks are compared. Get enough stamina to survive the content you plan to tank. Don't get more than that.Since 5.2 avoidance (parry/dodge) has become less bad than before as GC now has a chance to proc from missed attacks.

With 5.2 there are the Sunreaver Onslaught if you're Horde, or Kirin Tor Offensive if you're Alliance. Doing the quests needed for them with only levelling gear will likely see you very dead very messily. However, if you have the VP needed to buy yourself a necklace you might want to suicide your way to the quartermaster for the Shado-Pan Assault, because you start at neutral with them, which also happens to be the reputation needed for this raid faction.

You should probably focus on the new factions along with the Dominance Offensive / Operation: Shieldwall unless you're dead set on getting the two ilevel 489 items rewarded for getting Klaxxi and Golden Lotus respectively to exalted.Note that the Shado Pan Assault rewards you with ilevel 522 items for Valor Points. At the moment this guide only lists one item, available at neutral repuation, and will be upgraded to reflect what's available without a raid-group when that time comes (probably as early as the second week of 5.2).

You need to gain reputation with respective faction to unlock the availability of epic quality gear. You'll usually gain access to some at Honored status and the rest at Revered status. The 5.2 factions are exceptions to the rule.

Unless you plan to play WoW several hours per day you should expect each faction should take you about a month to unlock. 21 days is a number I've read to race to exalted, but remember that the Shado-Pan and August Celestials require you to get revered status with Golden Lotus before you can even start that race.

I highly recommend you to buy the grand commendation for The Klaxxi and the Golden Lotus as soon as you reach revered status (in fact I recommend you to do so for every faction to speed up alts) due to a possible bonus.

Valor Points

Valor Points can be gained in several ways. It's the currency used for the best faction rewards.

Justice Points

Justice points are gained in a similar way to how you gained them in Cataclysm. They're mainly used to buy ilevel 458 gear. There is, mildly put, a catch here. Unless you stubbornly stick to earning them from doing scenarios or normal mode difficulty dungeons only, you're likely to virtually drown in ilevel 463 drops from heroic mode dungeons long before you amass enough Justice Points to go shopping.

Still, if you recently reconnected to WoW from a Cataclysm raiding experience, then you should have a few thousand Justice Points lying around, enough to buy at least one slot's worth of ilevel 458 gear. Also, if you collect Valor Points by running heroic dungeons you will rather quickly gain enough Justice Points to buy that second slot.

You can also upgrade blue gear if the option is there. In reality we're talking about kicking ilevel 463 gear half a tier level. Looking at the list of failsafe gear (section six), we'll notice that our weapon and shield stop at ilevel 463. Now RNG may have equipped you in those slots, but if you're stuck with five-mans, then I'd advice going for these slots and kicking them from 463 to 471.

Blacksmiths have easy access to ilevel 450 and 476 plans. That said, the ilevel 476 items are a tad expensive to craft at eight Spirit of Harmony and eight Living Steel per piece. Without listing any specific items, the slots covered are head, shoulders, chest, wrists, hands, waist, legs, feet. Weapons and shields are also available.

Scribes can produce a tanking trinket at a punitive cost. As it depends on the production of eight Darkmoon cards produced at random, the trinket is formally not failsafe, but chances are rather high that you should be able to get one as long as you're willing to pay the cost.

Raiding rewards include more craftable options, but again, these are not failsafe because the availability isn't guaranteed.

Quests

Unless you have already collected the reward for the quests described in this subsection, this is a somewhat desperate way to get a bonus item.

By joining the general mayhem masqerading as a raid, ie killing the Sha of Anger for the first time, you'll be given a quest item which allows you to pick up a pair of ilevel 476 boots. Do no, I repeat, do not pick up the so called tanking boots. They come with dodge and parry combined and as such are a hysterical downgrade compared to the dps-boots linked here.

Golden Lotus is associated with a quest chain that will offer you ilevel 440, 463 and 489 items. I find it rather dubious that you will need an ilevel 440 ring. The ilevel 463 chest (tank or dps) unlocks at revered status, which is rather late. Finally, the ilevel 489 necklaces (tank or dps), unlocking at exalted, are both worse than the one you can buy for Valor Points from The Klaxxi at honored status. However, if you're gearing slowly and not wading around in Valor Points, this is an option.

5) Failsafe gearing tactics

Calendar time. There are some limitations to how quickly we will be able to collect failsafe gear. First of all Valor Points are capped at 1000 per week and at 3000 total. On top of that those very Valor Points are used to buy tier gear. You will have to decide how desperately you need the non-tier gear.

Reputations require time to grind. Add that both the Shado-Pan and August Celestials require you to be revered with Golden Lotus to start grinding in the first place.

The ring and neck slot can be gained from grinding The Klaxxi and Golden Lotus to exalted status respectively. If this option is still open to you and Valor Points are a limiting factor, then plan accordingly.

Good blues. The ilevel 450 crafted gear offers surprisingly good value for your money. You're set to tank heroic dungeons, which should see you collecting ilevel 463 gear.

On ilevel. While not the best in itemization (mildly put), Dominance Offensive / Operation: Shieldwall both offer ilevel 496 gear. Seven ilevels are seven ilevels. You can collect rings (haste/crit or dodge/expertise), boots (crit/expertise or dodge/parry), belt (parry/hit or crit/mastery) and an awful (dodge/mastery on-use), just bad (strength/crit on-use) or situationally useful (haste/intellect on-use) trinket. No matter how you twist and turn you'll end up with a huge chunk of unwanted stat.

More on ilevel. 460 is the magic number for any kind of raiding. That's when you're allowed inside LFR. If your ilevel is below 460 then don't reforge your gear aiming for the hit and expertise you see quoted on these forums, because you're tanking level 92 targets at the highest. (No, Sha of Anger doesn't count, because someone who is not you will have aggro on it.)

LFR is problematic. My recommendation is that you collect some kind of two handed weapon and queue up as dps in your tanking gear. You're more invisible that way, get to see the fights and (sadly enough) more likely to collect proper tanking gear than if you actually signed up as tank.This is a result of parry/dodge being the least desirable stats. Least? Yes, quite often less desirable than crit, even though crit undisputably is worse than either parry or dodge. The reason is that both parry and dodge have a tendency to come in absolutely huge chunks, thus eating up the item budget for the primary stat we want on the item. Forced to chose between 800 parry plus 300 haste and 550 crit plus 550 haste I'll collect 550 crit any day in the week unless I desperately need that extra 120 hit/expertice coming from reforging the surplus 250 unwanted parry.Check the raid rewards boss by boss and compare with what you have before you decide to sign up as tank or dps.From a failsafe point of view you're only in LFR collect your Valor Points, but in reality we hope for drops, which is why LFR is covered in this way.

PvP gear. It used to be frowned upon, but given that plate dps more often than not is preferable to our tanking gear for tanking, it should hardly come as a major surprise that some PvP gear make a perfectly decent job at padding out tanking slots. Depending on your server it may be easy or harder to collect honor points, but have a look at your PvP vendor and see if they offer anything interesting to you.

Speeding it up. I have included some PvP gear which requires you to grind Conquest Points. While those aren't free to collect and suffer from a weekly cap like your Valor Points, that cap isn't shared. If you have plenty of time to play on a daily basis, but need to gear up rapidly in a few weeks time, then I recommend you to take a thorough look at the ilevel 483 PvP gear listed and spend your VP on other slots to maximize the amount of ilevel 480+ gear you can collect per week.

Upcoming changes. We don't know exactly what happens after a patch, but we do know that it's a couple of months away at the most. There has been talk about nerfing paladin haste, but we have yet to see how that would be implemented. While I could advice tanks to stay vary of haste gear we're still tanking the here and now. Just don't throw away those mastery pieces. They're better for some fights anyway.

More changes. GC has stated that for patch 5.2 at least you won't be able to upgrade your gear. This usually won't matter for most of us because we don't have the Valor Points to spend on upgrades anyway. However, if you're here because you already raid but have been unlucky concerning a slot or two, then you may already have your Sha Touched weapon. Go upgrade it before 5.2 hits, because upgrades already done won't be removed, only the opportunity to make upgrades.

Even more changes. Some data concerning LFR in 5.2 is spawning on the net. It would seem you'll need an ilevel of 480 to join the fun. Observe the reference to Honor gear being dropped from 483 to 476. You may be eligible to join the new LFR the day prior to the patch going live, but not when you want to queue up.

6) Gear

Given that we can start tanking in whatever we ding 90 in (provided we didn't do so naked or in holy spec), I'm not providing any information about levelling gear. The ilevel 458 PvP gear listed here includes even those slots where the listed item is very iffy. They're there to help you crawl over ilevel limits. I've been much pickier with the ilevel 483 PvP gear.

2013-01-29 Originally published2013-01-30 Updating section 4 and 52013-01-31 Updated section five after input in this thread. Colourcoded some links. Populated section six with Blacksmithing craftables2013-02-01 Populated section six with other craftables and quest rewards. Added Challenge Modes clarification to my comment on not needing raid-cap hit/exp for five-mans.2013-02-02 Populated section six with faction rewards for Dominance Offensive / Operation: Shieldwall, The Klaxxi and Golden Lotus2013-02-04, Populated section six with faction rewards for The August Celestials. Added a note about using JP to upgrade blue gear (Thanks Thels). Added an ilevel 450 weapon (Thanks Flex).2013-02-04, requested sticky, guide at version 1.02013-02-06, Added some info on speed-gearing with Conquest Points. Populated section six with PvP gear (Thanks econ21)2013-03-11, Made some updates for 5.22013-03-12, Minor changes reflecting information added in this thread

Last edited by yappo on Tue Mar 12, 2013 7:49 am, edited 23 times in total.

- I'd put in a caveat about haste given that GC has said he wants to nerf it for us. Patch 5.2 is only a month or two away. I won't be spending any more valor on haste gear now.

- It might be useful to mention the ilevel requirements for LFR as these are likely to drive people's gearing efforts. 460 for MSV LFR is probably the most relevant to a failsafe list, as you are very likely going to need drops to get 470. However, when spending scarce valor, people may particularly have their eye on the 480 that will be needed to get get in 5.2 LFR. This provides an extra reason for prioritising the shieldwall rep grind first (even if badly itemised, the 496 is very helpful in meeting these ilevel requirements).

- While it is still possible, JPs and (indirectly, as they can be converted) Honor, are very useful in upgrading up 463 drops in order to help make the 470 ilevel requirement for HoF. Probably not strictly relevant to a failsafe guide but it reinforces your point that using JPs to buy gear is not a wise use of a surprisingly scarce resource.

- Honor gear would be worth a mention, as with 800 for a weekly TB victory and 500 for the rest, you can earn honor with very low effort if your side does predominates in Tol Barad. It's a failsafe way to get a helm with a meta-gem. It's not very good for getting to 470 but passable for 460 (and can be upgraded atm).

- I'd put in a caveat about haste given that GC has said he wants to nerf it for us. Patch 5.2 is only a month or two away. I won't be spending any more valor on haste gear now.

For what it's worth, he ACTUALLY said that he wants to make dodge and parry more appealing (and thus reduce the value of haste relative to avoidance). He has said that he doesn't want to nerf haste itself. He hopes that this will make "traditional" tanking gear more attractive/less bad.

- I'd put in a caveat about haste given that GC has said he wants to nerf it for us. Patch 5.2 is only a month or two away. I won't be spending any more valor on haste gear now.

For what it's worth, he ACTUALLY said that he wants to make dodge and parry more appealing (and thus reduce the value of haste relative to avoidance). He has said that he doesn't want to nerf haste itself. He hopes that this will make "traditional" tanking gear more attractive/less bad.

I chose to have my warning about haste a bit toned down. While a nerf might be incoming it's stated that haste isn't supposed to become worthless as a tanking stat. Like you I suppose Blizz found out the hard way that EVERYONE pukes on a dodge/parry piece, which could hardly be the reaction they wanted. Still I don't have too high hopes any fix they do will remove the underlying problem -- kill me or miss me, which isn't exactly the kind of gear our raidleaders want their tanks to show up in.

Fetzie wrote:For what it's worth, he ACTUALLY said that he wants to make dodge and parry more appealing (and thus reduce the value of haste relative to avoidance). He has said that he doesn't want to nerf haste itself. He hopes that this will make "traditional" tanking gear more attractive/less bad.

Well, we can engage in textual analysis of GCs tweets, but I doubt that's the best use of our time[1]. But it is clear that GC wants to stop us favoring haste gear, which is not supposed to be "our" gear, over traditional tank gear. For example, I would be amazed if they switch haste gear to also appear on tank loot lists (warriors would howl). How he tries to do that and whether he succeeds is anyone's guess. But it is a caution to bear in mind if you were reading Yappo's guide and can only buy 3-4 VP items before the changes.

[1]But I can't resist - it would not surprise me if we get some mechanic like the spellpower/attack power conversion, whereby haste like spellpower has a value to us but we don't benefit from stacking haste gear anymore than we would benefit from using a spellpower weapon. If we are lucky, we get a nice amount of baseline haste so we still enjoy the fast pace of haste-stacking tanks. But we don't aggro the dps by rolling on their gear and Blizzard get more decent palatanks actually tanking in LFR. We could still benefit from haste in the abstract - e.g. from bloodlust - so it would not be nerfed per se, but we would not benefit from haste gear.

You shouldn't use Justice Points to buy 458 gear. Instead, use the Justice Points to upgrade 463 items to 471 items. The 458 items are quickly replaced by running more Heroics, while the 471 items will help you getting into HoF/ToES LFR.

Crit is totally and utterly useless. A Parry/Dodge item is better than a Haste/Crit item of the same ilvl. You make it sound like Parry and Dodge are completely useless, which is not true. Haste and Mastery are simply better, but not insanely much so.

For Blacksmiths, you might want to get into a little more detail. We can craft:

ilvl 450 armor in all 8 slots. They're okayish, and probably worth replacing any sub-450 items.ilvl 450 weapons. These cost harmonies and are badly suited for tanking, but if you really need a onehander, these can be an option.ilvl 463 shield. It's decent, considering it's the same ilvl as drops in HCs.ilvl 476 chest and gloves. Epics which as said cost harmonies and living steel.ilvl 496 chest and gloves. Much higher ilvl epics, and probably quite useful to newly dinged tanks. In addition to harmonies and living steel, these also need blood spirits, which only drop from disenchanting raid epics. Most raiding guilds are swarming in those by now, so you might be able to buy some for a decent price. Note that the patterns drop at random in MSV/HoF, so not every blacksmith will have the required plans.

Last edited by Thels on Mon Mar 11, 2013 7:10 am, edited 2 times in total.

Thels... it's chest and gloves, not helm and gloves The 476 helm is from engineering.

theckhd wrote:Fuck no, we've seen what you do to guilds. Just imagine what you could do to an entire country. Just visiting the US might be enough to make the southern states try to secede again.

halabar wrote:Noo.. you don't realize the problem. Worldie was to negative guild breaking energy like Bolvar is to the Scourge. If Worldie is removed, than someone must pick up that mantle, otherwise that negative guild breaking energy will run rampant, destroying all the servers.

yappo wrote:Ok, sticky it and start yelling at me regarding what I forgot.

You do link the pvp vendors, but I'd put the honor gear in your lists. With 900 honor for a 15 min Tol Barad victory, it is very accessible. An Alterac Valley weekend would kit you out in full honor (and be something a PvE geared tank could be very useful in).

At 458 ilevel vs 450 for the crafted, it is significantly better. The helm includes a meta and quite a few pieces are mastery/hit (I don't recall much haste though). When it goes to 476, it will be SO much better than most failsafe stuff. Although I gather the crafted pvp gear will be boosted too, making the spiritguard stuff behind in the dust.

You might mention that PvP gear does not include the PvP stats in the ilevel anymore, so the old stigma against wearing PvP gear in PvE does not apply.

You might consider adding the items that are available from Shado-Pan Assault at friendly.

It's possible to farm a couple of trash mobs in ToT to get you close to friendly, and then do the Runestone quests that give you Shado-Pan Assault. Alternatively, there are consumables that raise your Shado-Pan Assault rep.

LFR also opens soon, which is likely going to provide the rep as well.

Calendar time. There are some limitations to how quickly we will be able to collect failsafe gear. First of all Valor Points are capped at 1000 per week and at 3000 total. On top of that those very Valor Points are used to buy tier gear. You will have to decide how desperately you need the non-tier gear.

The references to 483 malevolent gear for conquest should be changed to 476 malevolent gear for honour. Despite the nerf in itemlevel, I think PvP is now the best failsafe way of getting ready to raid. Ultimately, when 458 crafted pvp gear become available, there'll be little reason to grind heroics (except for valor). 458+476 pvp gear will get you into MSV LFR; some drops and more pvp will get you to 470. LFR should carry you to 480.

The Kirin Tor offer a 476 piece for cash and two 496 slots for valor; this could be mentioned when discussing the Shieldwall. I think KTO may be a better faction to grind than SW, for the elder charms. Although that's not strictly a failsafe consideration, I think LFR is the default gearing strategy for catching up - especially with the higher drop rates in 5.0 stuff.

The reference to the haste nerf could be updated. Avoidance has been made more attractive, by giving a chance to proc grand crusader; mastery/haste remain top dogs, you could reference the Sacred Duty blog for the details.

I suspect most people will want to save scarce valor for SPA gear; 522 vs 489/496 is not much of a contest.

It's time to face up to reality. I have, for all practical purposes, ceased playing WoW. I still believe there's a use for a failsafe guide, and thus I would feel better if someone from this excellent forum shouldered the task of maintaining one.